Page: Jobs are only part of the answer to nation's 'underclass'

Sep. 30, 2012

Written by

CLARENCE PAGE

Twenty-five years after sociologist William Julius Wilson's important study of urban decline and vanishing "marriageable men," poverty is still with us.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan-era conservatives were blaming urban "areas of concentrated poverty," also known as "the ghetto," largely on the rise in single parenthood and welfare dependency. Liberals mounted soapboxes to blame racism as a convenient explanation.

Wilson, then a University of Chicago sociologist, offered an alternative view in a book that stirred hundreds of follow-up studies and changed the national conversation ...